VIVES FIERRO, Antoni

Antoni Vives Fierro (Barcelona, 1940 - Barcelona, February 28, 2024) was a prominent Catalan painter, considered one of the great figures of figurative, post-impressionist, and urban painting in the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century. He began his artistic studies at an early age at the Escola de la Llotja in Barcelona and also trained at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc, studying under figures such as Josep Maria Garrut and Tomàs Bel. At the age of twenty, he moved to Paris, a one-year stay that proved decisive in his ultimate decision to pursue painting as a profession and way of life. He debuted with his first solo exhibition in Cartagena in 1962, after which he launched an intense national and international exhibition career (London, Geneva, New York, Paris, Athens, Montevideo, and Havana, among others). Vives Fierro was often defined as a "collector of cities," as he made the urban landscape the central axis of his work. His long and successful commercial and institutional career was honored in 2002 with the Creu de Sant Jordi, awarded by the Government of Catalonia. In 2015, he captured a large portion of his experiences and reflections on the artistic trade in his memoirs titled Smelling of Turpentine. Although his beginnings were dominated by dark palettes and gray tones (particularly tied to Barcelona's sober atmosphere), the impact of his trip and stay in Havana radically transformed his palette into an explosion of color, light, contrast, and saturation. In his final stages, he masterfully combined oil painting with the technique of collage, integrating cardboards and cutouts within an energetic brushwork of clear post-impressionist and expressionist resonance. His work is part of international prestige collections such as the Olympic Museum in Lausanne (Switzerland), the Reina Sofía Museum in Athens (Greece), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montevideo (Uruguay), the FC Barcelona Museum, and the Fundació Vila Casas.